Birds and Other Nature Sightings

     On Sunday afternoon I took my wife for a ride to Island Beach State Park.  Except for an abundance of common loons and a half dozen razorbills, it was a blasé day for birding along the beach.  However, a little change up greeted us when we reached the beach end at the inlet jetty.  A couple hundred gulls, mostly herring, gathered there, many on the water and many on the jetty.  Almost immediately, I spotted an all-white gull, amongst the white-and-gray gulls, sitting on the water near the jetty.  I pointed it out to my wife and then identified it as a Glaucous gull .  I explained to her that it was one of the two white-winged gull species that can show up this time of year, the other being Iceland gull .  I pointed out the difference that these gulls lack the black wing tips that all the other gulls around us had.  It was 13 months since I last saw a Glaucous gull.  My wife was with me that day too when we saw one flying along the beach in nearly the same spot. Juvenile glaucous g

     Along with the recent alcid irruption along New Jersey’s coast, there have been more than the normal sightings of small winter gulls from land.  Four small gulls in particular are Bonaparte’s Gull , Black-headed Gull , Little Gull and Black-legged Kittiwake .  The kittiwake is the only true pelagic gull of this group, so land-based sightings of these are special.  In the adult breeding stage of the four gulls, kittiwake is easy to separate from the other three because it lacks a dark head.  But in subadult stage, all four have a black spot of some sort behind the eye, all have tails with black tips and all sport an “M” pattern to varying degrees on their backs.  Since this is the nonbreeding season, the focus here will be on nonbreeding, or basic, plumage. Black-legged kittiwake is the least likely to be seen from land here.  It is the largest of the four gulls, but that requires a direct comparison to the others.  Its legs are black; the legs of the other three range from pink/p

     I spent today like I often do, driving along the beach at Island Beach State Park.  I am intrigued with the amount of alcids in our area and I want to see them as much as I can.  Any day they could just pick up and move out of sight.  It might be years before such incredible numbers occur again.  Today I counted 136 razorbills.  Much of the time all I needed to do was find a loose flock of Bonaparte’s gulls fluttering over the water.  Soon enough, a razorbill, or several of them, would pop up and the gulls would try to get some of the food that the submariner brought to the surface. Flotillas of razorbills off the beach.   © S. Weiss Along the way I also found 18 dovekies on the water.  Dovekies are rare here from shore.  In past years, it was a lucky birder to get one.  Needless to say, this is a personal high count.  Unfortunately, two of the 18 did not survive the day.  I watched one of these tiny birds too close to shore.  It was struggling with the waves and when it got caugh

     The past two days birding were very productive for winter sea birds.  On Monday I joined a group of birders on an inshore pelagic trip as part of the Barnegat (NJ) Christmas Bird Count.  We spent about ten hours on a boat patrolling the ocean boundaries of the area covered by the Bird Count in Ocean County, from Barnegat Inlet to the southern end of Holgate.  On Tuesday I spent about four hours at the opposite end of the county, at Manasquan Inlet standing on the jetty on the Point Pleasant side.  Both days were mostly highlighted by alcids - Razorbills  and Dovekies , and small gulls - Bonaparte’s and Little . The front end of a line of razorbills during morning flight.   © S. Weiss For the previous week or so, razorbills had been reported in huge numbers along the New Jersey coast from Sandy Hook to Cape May.  Observers reported hundreds of birds passing each day.  The birds didn’t disappoint us on Monday either.  During the first hour of Monday’s pelagic we tallied an amazing